November 2009

November 21, 2009

For a finale The Gift doesn't exactly end the current series with a satisfying bang unless you appreciate the entire cast getting drowned in bits of exploding orange Blathereen. More of a sloppy whimper. Rupert Laight's script captures the frivolous nature of the series and its characters well and still manages to get across a number of important messages about tolerance and acceptance of those different from yourself. Which is fine if he didn't, as Stuart Ian Burns quite rightly points out, turn his Blathereen making all the friendly overtures into the villains of the piece. Not an unexpected move but it does rather imply the precis of the story, about the nature of trust, is perhaps more akin to 'keep your friends close but your enemies closer still'.

The Blathereen are quite clearly the stock Slitheen costumes given a coat of orange paint and, whilst obviously keeping the budget affordable, they do actually work rather well because of the bright idea of bringing in voice talents like Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes. This covers up the money saving aspects of reusing alien costumes that even four years later on are, just from a technical view, one of the few new series failures. But with Callow and Margolyes in full on mode and a script fizzing with one liners, The Gift just about gets away with the Blathereen.

The Gift also reconfigures that unforgettable scene from Boom Town where Margaret Slitheen sits down to dinner with the Doctor and they mull over the moral issue of whether killing a murderer makes you no better than they are. As Sarah and the kids get ready to entertain the Blathereen couple I wonder how many viewers' itchy prejudices needed scratching about humankind's on/off relationship to 'the Other'. The discussion about race and culture in the kitchen as they make dinner for their visitors is a rather timely one that reflects the continuing anxieties about the naturalisation of immigrants and mimics the kind of dialogue some adults may well inadvertently and innocently be using themselves as one of their children invites a few friends home for tea.

The alien or extraterrestrial experience in Sarah Jane Adventures has also been a mix of wide-eyed reflections on historical and social references to the colonised or the conquered, a united impulse to fight that which is perceived as evil and as a threat to the 'family' or an essay in the struggles of the decentred subject (the 'lost child' is a popular one). With the Slitheen it's more or less a jab at capitalism and its effects and where conquest is about developing mass markets and making lots of money. Here, it literally is about squeezing the Earth dry in order to turn it into a diamond. When we get to the Blathereen, Laight is blurring the lines somewhat and leaves us and Sarah Jane having to think twice about the wonders of the universe and our 'friends' waiting for us out there.

What's intriguing here is that at first the Blathereen are portrayed as political functionaries of the Raxa High Council and then it is revealed that this is merely a front for two farmers who want to turn the Earth into a massive food store. The Blathereen story and the sub-plot about Clyde cheating at his exams dovetail quite neatly here. Honesty and hard work is the best policy it would seem and cheating could be seen as symptomatic of some inner trauma. With Clyde it's possible to see his desire to get through exams with the aid of K9 as a reaction to his dysfunctional family environment and with the Blathereen it's obviously an advantage to them in their competition with the Slitheen. A psychological battle going on between those two Raxicoricofallapatorian families is an interesting aspect to somewhat one-dimensional aliens.

Far better is the sub-plot about the alien plant given to Sarah Jane. As its spores infect those around her and spread across London to become the food stuff that the Blathereen will gorge on, Laight's story starts to push all sorts of Day Of The Triffids type reactionary buttons about 'Frankenstein foods' and GM crops. In the very week this story went out Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser at Defra called for UK trials of GM foods, arguing that the Government needs to be more open with the public about the risks and benefits of genetically modified foods. The Gift isn't exactly going to do him, his report and the government any favours as it not only tells a tale of alien plant spores choking the world to death but it also chucks in a cheeky swine flu allusion too.

A great plus here is the very natural dialogue and playing between the regulars. Laight's script tunes in to the ensemble dynamic and offers plenty of fun, especially with Clyde trying to use K9 to cheat at his school test. I also liked the continuing spat between Mr. Smith and the metal dog that's then used as an example of forgetting your differences to work for the greater good. Good CG effects for the Rakweed too and a stereotypically Doctor Who method of negating their effect. The school bell won't quite have the same meaning anymore for some children I'm sure and the use and subversion of the familiar within the cause and effect of these adventures offers a knowable and accessible universe to younger viewers.

With the Rakweed eliminated via sound waves and the Blathereen blown up in the attic with their own farts, The Gift adds a coda that's surplus to requirement and somewhat at cautionary odds with the cheerier disposition of the series as a whole. The second episode does have a natural ending in Sarah's paraphrasing of the Fifth Doctor, 'there should have been a better way' but the tacked on epilogue just implores you to stick two fingers down your throat because of its nauseous political correctness about friendship.

November 20, 2009

There was a rather good episode of The Thick of It a couple of weeks ago (I know they’re all rather good, but this was especially good) set at the party conference which pinioned on a physical altercation between the descendent of Fires of Pompeii’s Caecilius and Glenn being leaked to bloggers via Twitter. It felt very now. As I think someone in the unpopular press said, it made the show even more contemporary because it sounded like something that has already happened, which is hasn’t as far as we know, at least not in the political sphere. Twitter doesn’t seem to have made it into the Doctor Who universe yet, which means …

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift

… lacks a moment in which Clyde and Rani huddle over some client software like Tweetdeck watching words like “weird”, “plant”, “flower”, “splotches” and “twilight” trend in the TwitScoop while the All Friend column is awash with detailed eyewitness reports (well as detailed as they can be in a hundred and forty characters). This would have been the nu-Who equivalent of the railway station scenes in Doctor Who and the Silurians. Instead, they were watching BBC News via the iPlayer which whilst a brilliant expression of a governmental programme to get decent broadband into schools also seemed somehow, rather dated.

But The Gift overall felt very old fashioned, but in a good way. I complained last year that Enemy of the Bane, the climax of the second season was “brash, loud and disjointed, powered by a kind of atomised storytelling which has replaced such incidentals as logical plot structure and coherent character motivation”. The Gift couldn’t be more different. Perfectly paced, with a simply plot structure and mostly useful characterisation, it offered the chance to stop and think about the themes being offered up and to laugh at the hijinks of the kids, and concluded with a scene that was about as close to the conclusion to Children of Earth or The Waters of Mars as this adolescent franchise member is likely to have.

After the kind of chase through a warehouse which has all the hallmarks of a typical climax to a story in this series, Writer Rupert Laight (whose previous franchise credits have included some excellent short stories for the Doctor Who website, the novelisations of previous SJA stories and most interestingly one of the stories in Big Finish’s Sarah Jane Smith spin-off series) unexpectedly drops us into a homage to the Stanley Kramer’s film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (or when wet Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country) with the Blathereen standing in for Sydney Poitier (or the Klingons). The dialogue between the kids before hand is very on the nose; airing his suspicions, Luke says that it doesn’t matter what colour they are, they’re from the same planet as the Slitheen, as the camera pans across the kitchen to reveal Clyde and Rani.

Then, uniquely, a good ten minutes of the episode are spent at the dinner (in an empty Rani’s house, the parents conveniently at a conference apparently) with the kids enduring the table manners of their guests, their potentially racist remarks cleverly making us sympathetic towards the Blathereen, so that we understand when Sarah Jane takes them into her trust. The message until this point is that you can’t take people at face value; as I think Rani says at one point, there are bad people on the planet Earth as well. But it’s genuinely amusing, aided by some supreme voice work from Simon Callow and Miriam Margolyes of all people, demonstrating the benefits of getting proper actors in for such roles. Alice Troughton really enjoys stepping up to the challenge of filming the always difficult table scenes, my favourite shot between Sarah Jane and Rani at the sink as the mayhem of the meal plays out behind them.

The rest of the story is like that. There aren’t that many big action sequences, no speedy runs through corridors or shouting and not a lot of intercutting in the editing actually, with the story quietly playing out in refreshingly long scenes allowing the actors room to act which also benefits the characters, with a return to the neat bits of screwball comedy which were the hallmark of the first season, in this case between Clyde and Rani. If it didn’t quite work in the attic scenes were Sarah Jane seemed strangely listless initially at the prospect of her perfect (yet soon to be narratively sidelined again) son Luke somehow being ill which is an impossibility and should have tipped her off that something horrendous was in progress, the later scenes in which she enjoyed the reverse of her own domestic dinner party in the Blathereen ship were hilarious messy, bringing to mind the likes of Tiswas or Fungus The Bogeyman. That right there is how to entertain kids.

A fair use of CGI too. Though the production team couldn’t stretch to a Slitheen reveal this time, the unveiling of the vivid red petals of the flowers was very effective and the shots of the spores flying through air, though cartoony, had the same disturbing power as the virus droplets in those scenes in Outbreak as we watched them hover over our heroes and their classmates. Of course, in a perfect world there would have been dozens of these scenes with populace fleeing as the spores degraded even further the air quality of London, but as is always the case in SJA, even if the moon is falling to earth, it’ll be viewed through the eyes of our heroes, the catastrophe being left to our imagination through reported speech. Perhaps, just as we’ll never know what happened to these kids during Children of Earth, there’s a version of this story were Prime Minister Denise Riley is staring UNIT out across the cabinet table and asking them if they have any good gaseous pesticides.

If there’s a problem with the thematic heart of the story, it’s that having passed on to kids the anti-racism message, the needs of the narrative to have a villain leads to the reveal that the Blathereen were villains all along, a turnaround which is fairly dark stuff for something in the CBBC slot. People who aren’t like you are ok – oh no wait, no they’re not, they’re bastards after all and they want to take your land. Laight does briefly leave the possibility hanging that perhaps the Blathereen are set up, but it’s not long before they’re shown chomping their way messily through another meal. Anyone who’s read the spin-off novel from which they’re sourced, Stephen Cole’s The Monsters Inside, will know that they really are as bad as the Slitheen anyway, I suppose.

Viewed through the prism of recent franchise editions, the conclusion of this story is also fairly challenging. Having spent the best part of three years saying that sentient beings deserve a second chance, and third, and fourth, and … with the whole conversation about the execution of Margaret in Boomtown having already seen much of her family destroyed by a missile, with whole stories which talk about the orphaning of aliens, Sarah Jane uses Mr Smith to destroy the Blathereen couple, splattering their remains across the inside of the attic in a moment that inappropriately reminded me of the Marvin scene in Pulp Fiction, and like Tarantino’s best scene (!) it’s played for laughs and is very, very funny.

The final moments of the episode demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the series. The scenes in which our heroes are huddled together amid the orange goo, the actors clearly trying not to laugh, like the earlier were Clyde is trying to hide the tin dog under the table much to Rani chagrin are adorable and demonstrates as I’ve already mentioned over and over and over again that when the characters aren’t simply spouting masses of exposition at each other we like spending time with them. That's what ultimately made this episode so entertaining. Plus Clyde's one liners. And the continued rivalry between Mr Smith and K9.

About the only thing really wrong with the story was the coda. The perfect end to the story and the season would have been a pan away from the group in that attic wiping Blathereen remains from their eyes, having saved the world and enjoying the consequences. That final montage which is supposed to bookend the series and may be trying to be as depthful as an Angela’s philosophy montage from My So-Called Life but ends up being as anodyne as similar monstrosities in Heroes or Defying Gravity (“Some people say that life is a dream. It could be a dream. It depends if we dream and when we dream and what we dream about etc”).

November 19, 2009

In a parallel universe The Waters of Mars is a run-of-the-mill base-under-siege romp. The Doctor turns up, he defeats some water-based monsters with a cheeky wink and a breathless "Allons-y!", and then he skips back to the TARDIS just in time for tea. It's no great shakes. Much like 75% of the new series to be blunt. Oh well, it's their loss.

Having said that, the majority of this universe's version of The Waters of Mars is nothing to write home about either. Admittedly, there's a very nice set, an interesting monster, some engaging performances, and a postmodern joke about corridors, and it's all very nicely done, in sparkling HD no less, but you couldn't call it anything special. We've seen this play out a hundred times before, or as the wife so succinctly puts it: "David's working his notice".

She couldn't have been more wrong, because bubbling away beneath the surface of this tale (no pun intended) is a plot twist so profound it actually made me sit up and question exactly what it is that I want out of this show.

I lived for my monthly dose of the Virgin New Adventures, especially the ones where the 7th Doctor was a complete and utter ****

When I was in my 20s I yearned for a dark-Doctor. I lapped up the moral ambiguities of Ghost Light, I subscribed wholeheartedly to the Cartmel Masterplan and I lived for my monthly dose of the Virgin New Adventures, especially the ones where the 7th Doctor turned out to be a complete and utter ****. I adored how this incarnation of my childhood hero was suddenly an angst-ridden enigma who seemed to be embroiled in a Machiavellian plot against the laws of the universe itself. He took LSD. He let his companions shag their boyfriends in the TARDIS before letting said boyfriends die grisly deaths in front of them. He even managed to drive Ace so insane she actually tried to kill him once. Yes, he was a bit of a git, but he saw the big picture and I couldn't get enough of him. One day, I thought, I'll see this version of the Doctor on television. Yes, one day...

Unfortunately, the 10th Doctor has been the very antithesis of this "fantasy Doctor" that I've always longed for. This Doctor is smug, self-congratulatory and sentimental, with more annoying catchphrases than Cannon and Ball. During the transmission of seasons two and three of the new series, I kept kidding myself that this ebullient bonhomie was a fragile mask and deep down inside the 10th Doctor was a brooding psychopath who was ready to snap at a moment's notice. We even saw glimpses of this hidden persona on-screen, most notably in the closing moments to The Family of Blood where the Doctor decided to torture and humiliate some second division villains for all eternity, just because they broke his hearts. But in the end I gave up, figuring that if bleating on and on about the bloody Time War year after year wasn't going to push him over the edge, nothing was.

I honestly believed that The Waters of Mars would conclude with the Doctor walking away from Bowie Base with the deaths of the crew echoing poignantly inside his helmet. As the screen faded to black I would have risen from my chair to applaud the sheer audacity of that denouement, glossing over the inevitable coda where we see Adelaide's descendants leading the human race into space in a cutesy rocket, accompanied by a sorrowful, but hopeful, speech from Tennant. I would have been happy with that: I would have bandied the word "brave" around in this review and I'd have been raving about the achingly powerful scene in the airlock where Adelaide and the Doctor lay down the rules for the show and still manage to make them sound beautiful. Or the fantastic moment where Peter O'Brien blew himself up just as he was about to turn. Or that great bit when that geeky bloke simply resigned himself to his fate. All incredible moments. All eclipsed by the shit storm to come.

if bleating on about the bloody Time War year after year wasn't going to push him over the edge, nothing was...

Because the only way to stem those scenes of highly stylised carnage was for the Doctor to single-handedly take on the Laws of Time. And every Doctor Who fan knows that our hero would never ever do that, no matter how hard we might secretly want him to. And you definitely can't do it if you've just spent 45 minutes banging on and on about how you really, really, really can't. I know RTD has taken the art of copping-out to giddy new heights during his reign but surely even he couldn't concoct a happy ending out of this mess.

When the moment finally arrived it was heralded by a wonderful subversion. We've seen this all before: that heroic slo-mo
shot of the Doctor striding through a wall of flames (on the surface of Mars? really?) enveloped by a Murray Gold crescendo, determined to save the day. It's become something of a motif in this era of the programme but this time I was shouting "No! No! No!" at my television for entirely different reasons.

Normally, when Tennant turns up the volume and really lets rip, I can't help but wince. But when he unleashed merry hell here, raging against Time itself, I was completely sold. I think the brilliance of that scene is that no matter how wrong you know it is, you can't help but be carried along by the Doctor's mania. You know that it goes against everything he stands for, and you know that it'll eventually end in tears, but still, how cool was that escape? Even if the robot was knowingly shit.

This would have been incredible enough on its own, but it got much, much worse. The Doctor's reckless act isn't a short-lived aberration driven by adrenaline and instinct, and when the TARDIS arrives in yet another snowy suburb (and yet another subverted motif) the Doctor expects to be congratulated when he really should be consumed with guilt and regret. I expected him to have second thoughts and to take them all back to bravely face their fates. That it takes Adelaide to show him his error of his ways is truly chilling. For a moment there the Doctor really loses it. His reference to the "little people" is horrific. Is this what he really thinks, all of the time?

Tough.

Enveloped by a Murray Gold crescendo...

I've criticised this show in the past for not having the balls to kill any of the really important characters so nothing could have prepared me for the climax. I thought Torchwood was sailing close to the wind with an implied infanticide at 9:55pm, but this... I can hardly believe it. I'm just relieved that I wasn't watching it with an 8 year old child. Having to explain to them what that flash was, or why David Tennant looked so horrified all of a sudden would have been a real pain. Or am I blissfully naive? Are kids really that desensitised today? Do implied suicides take place on Home and Away, or whatever passes for Byker Grove these days, on a regular basis? Not that I'm complaining but... blimey! Doctor Who hasn't been this bleak since the early 1970s!

And now I truly believe that this incarnation of the Doctor must die. And he knows it too. Because if he's caved in once he'll probably do so again. And while it is certainly tempting to witness a whole episode where the Doctor gallivants around the universe, erasing World War 2 and then having to deal with the (inevitably far worse) consequences, this dark Doctor only enjoys approximately 7 minutes of screen time. And I was actually kind of glad.

Because we don't need a dark-Doctor. There's enough darkness and ambiguous protagonists on the telly these days without dragging our hero into it. Battlestar Galactica has a lot to answer for, and most of it ends up on Five, so I was actually relieved when it dawned on the Doctor that he'd gone too far, as the time line (almost a character in its own right) remorselessly reasserted itself. For once, his arrogant smugness is turned against him and I was literally gobsmacked.

It's an incredible performance from Tennant, and it the tradition of the Watcher and Cho-je, we even get an eeire apparition signaling the character's demise. It's a fabulous moment that evoked the pathos of Davison and the stoicism of Baker, and it was hard not to get choked up as the cloister bell sounded in those closing moments. Quite brilliant.

Surely the most plausible explanation is that she she went stir-crazy
and blew everyone up in a suicidal rage. How inspirational is that?

The only reason why The Waters of Mars doesn't quite steal Midnight's crown as Tennant's greatest adventure is that it doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. For example, surely the reason why the Dalek didn't exterminate little Adelaide was simply because the Daleks weren't out killing humans willy-nilly during the events of Journey's End? They were about to explode a reality bomb if I remember correctly, so what would have been the point? And if the Dalek really, really believed in the fixed point in time theory then surely it would therefore know that Davros' plans would go tits up - how else would she survive? And if it didn't really matter, it could have exterminated her anyway, assuming the Daleks were out doing that in the first place. Which they weren't. So, in summary, what started out as a surprising scene - quite beautiful in a perverse way - now feels like a contrived contractual obligation.

I don't buy the whole "Adelaide inspires humanity to go to the stars" mantra either. It's far too pat for my taste but the entire story hinges on it. If the Doctor hadn't got involved in this event the official story would have been that Adelaide detonated a nuclear device on Mars for no adequately explained reason. It's a complete mystery, according to the Doctor and Futurepedia. So it must be true. Surely the most plausible explanation is that she she simply went stir-crazy and blew everyone up in a suicidal rage. How inspirational is that? How did they manages to spin that into an act of heroism? In this perverted time line she's killed herself after abandoning her crew instead. Hardly inspirational. Surely the web of time could have just chosen someone else? Did it really hang on her grand daughter being inspired by her, no matter how she happened to kill herself, to take us to our ultimate destiny? It's hard to swallow. And believe me, I've tried.

But who cares! I didn't really buy the spaceship in Utopia either and the last 10 minutes of that story restored my faith in this show too. And yes, we all know what happened there, and yes, I know that John Simm has threatened to ramp up his performance to eleven this time, which boggles the mind quite frankly, and yes, they are probably going to irritate the hell out of me whilst simultaneously making me cry. But for a few precious moments there, Doctor Who was the most surprising thing on television again.

November 16, 2009

No flying bus, no cat-suited jewel thief, no babbling on about chops and gravy.

Well, that's a good enough start for me. The Waters Of Mars sets its stall out with great panache and stylishly recycles Who tropes with ballsy direction from the ever reliable Graeme Harper. It gleefully inverts the 'base under siege' plotting by initially distancing the Doctor from the participants in the story with his mantra of 'I should go' but also by gradually allowing the audience to witness the Doctor's dark sovereignty as the 'Last Of The Time Lords' to finally express itself in that highly charged scene where, space-suited, he walks away from Bowie Base One and listens to humanity, in all its Troughton-esque international manifestations, 'rage against the dying of the light'.

'The Flood' and its zombified, infected humans, the international crew, the retro-NASA production design (and a nod by the sound boys to 2001 with the proximity detection noise) and the crisp CGI Martian landscapes are the perfect adornments to a particularly unpalatable poison chalice. We've had hints of a Doctor out of control and dealing with fixed points in time in previous episodes, with The Runaway Bride, Family Of Blood and The Fires Of Pompeii being particularly good examples, but he's always been tempered by a human companion and prevented from going too far. The distancing effect between Doctor and human victims here is crucial to understanding that on some occasions the Doctor is actually supposed to do nothing and to preserve key moments of history. He knows it and we know it.

Russell T Davies and Phil Ford perceptively and, as the Matt Smith incarnation waits in the wings, some would say inevitably, get the Doctor questioning his own use and abuse of power, the reasoning and morality of his decisions. The results are devastating. He becomes a Doctor we don't recognise and a callous, arrogant figure who interferes with humanity's democratic choices between life and death as represented by the Bowie Base crew. In that return to Earth, he expects the survivors to be grateful in a way that we've never witnessed before. He demands that his ego is stroked and where he now has right of force of command over himself as a Time Lord in control of the laws of time, he removes the rights of the humans in his care. He choses which ones will be saved and which ones will be forgotten.

In the current series, the political power of the Time Lords, as a project and as a philosophy, has completely collapsed. Time and the universe are actually free of their gaze until the Doctor attempts to resurrect himself as 'Time Lord Victorious' and in doing so we see that in fact a 'Time Lord Victorious' throws into crisis the notion of temporal government. It begins to force 'the little people' of each race out of the picture and ignores the political value of the multitude. In essence therefore, Adelaide and the Doctor struggle with the core idea of what it is to be free. They both provide us with interesting examples of what it is like for humans and Time Lords to have sovereignty over one's self and one's fate. As the Doctor undergoes the traumatic process in The Waters Of Mars of naming himself the 'Last Of The Time Lords', we can see that if Tennant's era has been about anything then it is about the Doctor's reluctance to accept that he really is the last of his kind and to acknowledge that the burden of responsibility, the carrying out of the laws of time, is now his alone. It's only as we get to the end of The Waters Of Mars do we truly understand what that burden is and how precariously safe the universe has been in the hands of a war survivor Doctor.

The virus that infects the Bowie Base crew is also a powerful metaphor about the way globalisation strips humanity of its identity. As Adelaide explains to the Doctor her reasons for why she's out on the new frontier we get an image of a severely compromised Earth that isn't that far away from current predictions. The virus is a global force, highly pertinent that it's in the water, that removes 'difference'. It's an homogenising element that destroys the very human qualities we cherish - self, love, identity, home. The zombies that it creates forgo the memories of their families or their children and the ability to feel any kind of human compassion. This is emphasised by the death of Steffi Ehrlich who re-watches a video message from her family as the waters close in and possess her. The various nationalities on the base are not just an homage to the similar set-ups in the Troughton era but they are in effect a microcosm of our own world where cultural and social differences are being eroded away by the tides of monocultural globalisation. The story positions the alien as homogenising aggressor and the human as a force for the greater good.

The Doctor also requires the very qualities that the Flood seeks to snuff out in a human companion. Adelaide, just like all his companions, is there to humanise him but also to reinforce his denial of the true freedom to completely own the power of the Time Lords. We see here that once he takes ownership of the laws of time he's immediately corrupted and dangerous to himself and to us. Once he strays down that path then all the fixed points in time become unfixed and are simply divested of their importance to the web of time. They are meaningless as great achievements born out of death and sacrifice because the Doctor now believes he has a right to unfix their necessary circumstances. For example, the deaths of Adelaide and her crew are to an extent prevented, their sacrifice becoming illusory narratives of redemption. It's a redemption that leads to Adelaide's suicide.

Adelaide completely recognises how the Doctor's moral core shifts here and she realises that she has to take the Doctor's redemptive actions on Mars to their proper conclusion. This goes beyond caring about her legacy and achievements that are continued down the bloodline. It's an existential decisionism where she must refashion history and enable it to escape from the Doctor's new found pedagogy. The incredibly powerful scene where she relates to the Doctor her encounter with the Dalek suggests that the time-travelling Daleks are also aware of the construction of history and Adelaide's place in it. This encounter, as the Dalek literally gazes into her soul, suggests the existence of the web of time from which no one can escape even if there is an arrogant Doctor who believes he has the law of time on his side. It's a dark vision that goes back all the way to the underbelly of the Enlightenment.

This web consists of a penetrating, constant gaze which harvests information in order to create profiles and classifications (tangibly enforced by those quick cuts to the Bowie Base team biogs, announcing births, deaths, places); there is also a constant reinforcement of norms in such a way that one cannot operate outside of them without some sort of sanction (the Doctor's refusal to interfere in fixed points in time, his recognition that he shouldn't be there and his later his self-sanctioning to do so); finally, there is a human based 'social' rather than a Doctor based 'sovereign' power, which operates without a tangible leader and instead along myriad lines, through a multiplicity of relations (Adelaide and her legacy which leads to the human colonisation of the galaxy). Power and knowledge are at the centre of The Water Of Mars - a companion's ability to understand the need to reinforce the social human order and a Doctor's hubris in acknowledging himself as ruling 'Time Lord Victorious'. As Adelaide commits suicide to preserve the normative structure of time, the Doctor, emulating the young Master as he looked into the unfettered schism of the vortex, catches a glimpse of himself as its future, dark architect.

Tennant and Lindsay Duncan are simply superb in this drama. Both give very subtle performances that elevate these themes above the horror and science fiction trappings of the story. Tennant in particular showcases his ability as an actor to turn the character on a sixpence. The man that emerges from the TARDIS in London 2059 is clearly not our Doctor simply through the way Tennant physically occupies the space, holds himself and expresses emotion through the set of his facial characteristics. There's something dark going on behind the sparkling eyes. Duncan is excellent as the no-nonsense and practical Adelaide and she peels away the layers of the character gradually as the story progresses, revealing a thoroughly romantic vision in the anecdote about the Dalek and finally railing against the Doctor's self-satisfaction, his smugness, by confirming that death is just as important as life. Her suicide is one of the most powerful moments in the story, and perhaps in the entire run of the new series, underlining the narrative force of death that echoes down the 47 year history of the show itself.

And it's not all dark. There is that rather lovely in-joke about Doctor Who consisting of people running down corridors. In The Waters Of Mars the corridors are very, very long and people do am awful lot of running, prompting the Doctor's witty little joke about providing fold-up bikes. The first encounter with Adelaide, as she trains her gun on the Doctor, and demands his rank, name and intention, and latterly gets the response 'fun' is also very amusing. Gadget the robot threatens to become an annoying creation but again the Doctor hurls the kind of abuse at it that the audience would clearly empathise with and thus it creates a sense of knowingness between character and audience about an object of vilification. In the end, Gadget is merely a means to an end to get the TARDIS to the base and fulfills its function without diluting the rest of the drama.

In the end, this was the perfect response from Russell T Davies in a post-Torchwood: Children Of Earth conclusion to the Tenth Doctor's era. The idea of a Doctor claiming control for himself over the laws of time is a perfect reflection of Torchwood's depiction of politicians choosing which children need to be sacrificed according to their social importance. It's rather frightening now to consider that there's a Doctor out there that makes similar decisions on how the 'little people' are or aren't important to the web of time. And that's not right. We've come a long way from the joyous exultation of 'this time...everyone lives' from a Time War damaged Doctor in The Empty Child.

When The Twin Dilemma was inexplicably released earlier in the year, once play.com had posted it to me, I undid the shrink wrap, watched the Stripped For Action documentary then put it on the shelf, the main feature unwatched. Despite working my way through the Eighth Doctor novels, I’ve never enjoyed the Virgin New Adventures much and find the latter parts of the McCoy era near unwatchable. For a period I wondered why this was the case (beyond quality control concerns) and it struck me watching closing minutes of The Waters of Mars. When the Doctor stops being the “benevolent alien” he stops being my Doctor.

In each of these stories or eras, the creative team turned the character, to varying degrees into a darker figure, play up his superhuman qualities, his arrogance, his willingness to bend the rules, made him cruel as a way of differentiating him from us, a mystery, a who, an other (and in the case of the New Adventures apparently literally The Other). The problem was that much of this work was done abruptly, unheralded, with no cooling off period and with a foggy attitude to justification. Except if you’re a decent writer you want to keep your character interesting, you have to go there, you have to show what happens when the responsibility of power takes hold.

Most often the approach is to create a parallel character, very much like the hero but whose back story is just different enough that the audience can see what would happen if the hero gene was in the wrong place. Star Trek (and dozens of other genre series and films) have made this explicit by literally giving the lead character an evil twin, but that can only go so far. In Doctor Who, The Meddling Monk and later The Master and later still in the novels Sabbath were created to fulfil this criteria. But that too only goes so far because it’s not really the lead character but you have to be very bold to show your hero going to the dark side and do it in such a way that he can still retain our sympathy.

This latest production team are bold; at the dawn of the new age they want develop the character, but they’re also clever enough to know that you can’t abruptly make a change like that, you have to lead the audience towards it, so that, when the Doctor becomes the arrogant figure, “timelord victorious” we understand, so the audacious structure of The Waters of Mars is designed to get the audience from smiling with the Doctor as he steps onto the red planet to frowning with him as he realises he’s taken his power too far and the web of time gets ready to smack him down. The Twin Dilemma failed because we were meant to believe that this is the new Doctor, whether we like it or not. Yeah, great. What all the time? No wonder the ratings dropped. They didn’t have a recipe. Russell T Davies and Phil Ford had a recipe. And here it is:

he’s taken his power too far and the web of time gets ready to smack him down

First, take the most traditional Doctor Who story cliché you can find, something nice and overripe. A base under siege. The boyabase, sorry, Bowie Base, was literally a base under siege. Then emphasise all of the elements of that cliche. Include a large room where most of the action takes place. Lightly sprinkle an alien threat, in this case a horrific possession via water infection, not too much, just something sticky enough that it could potentially destroy the Earth. Keep the fans happy by referencing the very monster they’re expecting to be involved but aren’t but imply they could be anyway (squee).

Lightly sprinkle hardy crew members ready to picked off by whatever monster is loose in the station. They’re basically the same lot who fought the manic Ood and Abaddon’s cousin in The Impossible Planet’s Satan Pit with slightly different names, clearer international origins and more historic relevance, with the Doctor wearing the space suit he picked up in that story as a constant reminder, or any number of Troughton era stories. But unlike most stories (with the exception of the commander) be careful not to make them too individual, too special.

Once that’s set, take a brush and glaze this concoction with another cliché, but one which isn’t often been used in conjunction with the first ingredient, like adding chilli to chocolate, in this case that the events that are happen on the base are fixed point in history which cannot be changed ever. I talked at great length about this in my Fires of Pompeii review but in essence my theory on how the process works is that the Doctor can happily change history unless he’s aware of it. He could do what he liked down the Satan Pit or on the moonbase or inside Sea Base 4 because he didn’t have prior knowledge of what happened there.

So when faced with Adelaide Brooke and friends and with his mental Wikipedia (bang, bang, bang) not down for maintenance his logical instinct is to walk away, but his benevolence is telling him to stay. Like the space suit, offer a reminder, verbally in this case, to the last story the audience saw such a scenario in to add an extra layer of understanding of what’s being faced. Later in the episode confront the person who’s going to be directly effected by events with the news of their own demise. And if you’re really clever, tie this in to a previous story too (though oddly, it means that the Daleks must also have residually known they’d fail too if young Adelaide wasn’t meant to die then).

Place in a pre-heated oven at gas mark 6 for thirty minutes. I’m not sure why gas mark 6, but everything I cook these days seems to require gas mark 6, so it must also be the setting the production team used in preparing to perfection this magnificent episode. During the cooking time, on the edges, the clichés bond together to create something new, a flavour the like of which has never been tasted and for the sake of my own sanity and because I’ve stretched this metaphor I’d best stop here before I start comparing David Tennant to yeast.

The point I’m trying to make is that the production team in throwing these two seemingly insoluble elements together somehow created a kind of narrative comfort food which like a desert in an Agatha Christie mystery is discovered mid course to be laced with cyanide. But unlike the then new Doctor in The Twin Dilemma or Time’s Champion, we understand the events which led to that change and that’s what makes it acceptable.

They twist his benevolence so that it becomes his downfall. Impudently, they have the Doctor walk away and because we’ve been perfectly conditioned, we want him to. For once, we don’t want him to go back and save the base or its crew and when he does it’s a shocking betrayal and even as he does all of the Doctorish things we’ve loved to see him do in the past, we’re frowning because it’s wrong. Oh so very wrong and potentially even more acutely for long terms fans who've had the concept of the web of time rammed down their throats for so long.

But because of all of the careful writing and directing which has led up to the moment, the heartbreaking moment when, in the wreckage of the rocket his own words come back to haunt him, we’re still sympathetic, but it’s the sympathy we give someone with an addiction perhaps, in this case to power. Pity and an understanding that the actions we’re witnessing will ultimately be self destructive unless something happens to bring him down to earth.

We are confronted with the dark version of the Doctor, the same man, but with his moral compass given a Daliesque melt, the forces he’s otherwise kept in check given reign. He’s scary and with no influence other than his own conscience, he’s the monster, whose own benevolence his downfall. Still my Doctor and also not. And utterly compelling. We’ve glimpsed him once or twice before, notably at the close of The Family of Blood, but then his darkness was measured.

This is a man who now looks at human beings and picks out the important ones. And we understand because the writing and direction have done that too throughout the episode, whole scenes played in master from the point of view of the Doctor stood metres away instead of in close up on their faces. That’s the change. Before, every life was important. When the Doctor falls to the ground after seeing the blue light in the window are we completely sure it isn’t because he’s let one of the important ones die anyway? The psychological complexity of this story, both in the conception of the lead character and the expectations on the audience for understanding thereof is breathtaking and this is one of those occasions when I'm not sure I've done it justice. I'm not sure it's even possible to do it justice.

Through a combination of the writing, the direction and devastatingly detailed performances from David Tennant and Lindsey Duncan (who magnificently and rightly got her name in the titles) on the one hand The Waters of Mars was as traditional a story as you could possible find, but on the other, something totally new, Doctor Who’s equivalent of Torchwood's Children of Earth with a conclusion somehow even darker because it’s in a family show. I’m still reeling. Can you believe that Doctor Who registered the suicide of a character in the eyes of its leading man? Doctor Who? If Midnightwas dark, The Waters of Mars was like being lost in the countryside at one o’clock in the morning without a flashlight and weird clicking noises all about you.

November 15, 2009

I love a good postmodern joke. Especially in Doctor Who. There are several crackers about the Mona Lisa and contemporary art in City Of Death. The problem with Mona Lisa's Revenge is that it tries to extend the punchline on its own terms and the results go down as well as a fifth rate comedian on a wet Friday night at the Glasgow Empire. I don't really mind that Doctor Who and its spin-offs constantly move the goal-posts as far as established continuity are concerned. That's the nature of the beast and no doubt someone is out there frantically trying to square the circle between one version of the creation of the Mona Lisa and this one. So, I didn't sit nervously expecting some contrived ret-conning of the events of City Of Death to explain why Mona Lisa comes to life and has a Northern accent. What I do find annoying is that I'm presented with something so irritatingly dull that I find it painful to watch.

Orson Welles once made a rather clever film, terribly postmodern, about art, reality and forgery. I was hoping we'd get some of those playful ideas here but Phil Ford's script isn't as clever as he seems to think it is. Beyond the main idea of actually bringing La Giaconda to life, he quite clearly hasn't much of an idea what to do with her once she's free, waving a Sontaran blaster in the air and sounding like Melanie Sykes in the old Boddington adverts. I half expected her to bellow out, "Ey, Luke are your trolleys on right way round?" as she picked on Luke for his guilt over a tantrum with Sarah Jane. Ford would have been as well to emulate Duchamp and Dali, who really did know how to send up Da Vinci with a few well chosen Freudian jokes, in this rather tiresome fifty odd minutes.

I couldn't quite work out whether this was a story about a teenage boy's emergence into masculinity, a teenage boy's discovery of his true talents, a really annoying Northern woman clearing pretending to be the Mona Lisa or the repressed love affair between Mr. Harding and Miss Trupp. In the end it was trying to be all of these and yet not entirely succeeding to be any of them because Ford can't settle with any confidence on his theme. The potential story of how a woman in a painting, brought to life, would cope when she finds herself in the real world, is squandered. It barely gets a look in and it's the jewel that's sitting in the middle of the Jackson Pollocks that are so carelessly being thrown together in this story. If anything could have given the story he(art) and soul then Mona's desire to escape her frame of representation, with a comment on the aesthetics, reproduction and exploitation of imagery, would have been very interesting.

For starters, and it's something that personally annoyed me, there's a rather unconvincing and crass discussion between Clyde and Luke about art which for anyone who knows even a modicum about Renaissance art would seem tantamount to blasphemy. Art is apparently not about geometry, it's about soul. A simplistic analysis that makes Leonardo Da Vinci, who probably knew a fair few things about geometry as well plate tectonics, anatomy, solar power, flight and mechanisation, just a another head in the clouds artist who pops a bit of paint on a canvas? Also, I'm all for encouraging those of school age to think seriously about careers in the cultural industries and it's great there is a message that says 'drawing is cool' but did we really have to have those that care about art, about how it connects to everyone's lives, represented by two very worn out old cliches like Mr. Harding and Miss Trupp. They both look like they've wandered out of the Festival Of Britain and seem an unlikely pair to be left in charge of the International Gallery. It employs an assistant curator who comes on sexually to the visitors and is jealous of a woman with no eyebrows.

The set up at the International Gallery suggests a cultural environment that's weak-willed, stuffy and repressed where even those cliches of their day Professors Rubeish, Kettlewell and Kerensky might feel at home. Besides, the security around one of the world's most priceless art treasures is seemingly non-existent and seems almost symptomatic of the insecurity and weird sexual undercurrents at the heart of Harding's obsession with Mona Lisa too. His and Trupp's behaviour suggests that anyone in the arts has to seriously overcompensate in order to stand a chance of getting their leg over. This is stuff best left to poor 1970s sit-coms along with sensible shoes, big bow ties and cardigans and lines like 'Security. The Mona Lisa has been stolen!'

Whilst Episode One just about gets away with it, and is helped greatly by the scenes between Luke and Sarah, the brief exchange between Mr. Smith and Sarah in the attic and Clyde's realisation that he might be talented, it is Episode Two that plunges this story to its place right at the bottom of the series' league table. And I'm looking at you Suranne Jones. She makes Russ Abbott look like a respectable graduate of the Stanlislavski school of acting. It's a BIG performance and it's thoroughly irritating. She's not entirely to blame because it's Ford who has somehow decided that it would be entertaining to have the Mona Lisa come from Salford and use words like 'sugar' and 'blag' and refer to Harding as 'Harders'.

There is also a lot of exposition in Episode Two. Lots of telling and very little showing to try and explain Mona's relationship to her brother but I'm not entirely clear what exactly Mona Lisa is seeking revenge for? Yes, she wants to free her Abomination brother from a painting but how does that work as an act of revenge? Revenge on whom? The artist? People who visit art galleries? Ford hurriedly cobbles together a mishmash of explanations via at least four characters and even reuses his own 'energy force trapped in a meteorite' plot from The Day Of Clown. The worst aspect of this is the whole Chekhov's gun use of the Chinese puzzle box. It was obviously signaled in Episode One but by Episode Two Ford thinks we've completely forgotten about it, even though it's being mentioned rather a lot in dialogue, and he bungs in a flashback to Episode One. Similarly, it happens with Clyde's drawing of K9. Insultingly, it's assuming the audience's attention span resembles that of a gnat.

Whilst all this is going on the star of the show has unceremoniously been framed in a picture and dumped on the floor for much of Episode Two. Whilst Lis Sladen may have wanted a bit of a break, I was rather miffed that we weren't going to see much of her in her fetching Pertwee outfit of blue velvet jacket and white frilly blouse. Whilst she's sorely missed from the story, I appreciate that the three regulars work very hard to try and make this dog's dinner remotely palatable. I quite like the ideas of creatures hiding in paintings and the story of the Abomination is interesting but the execution here is spoiled by an over-ripe performance from Suranne Jones, an unclear revenge plot and way too much running about and talking.

One thing that did bother me about the idea of paintings coming to life was that Ford flagrantly ignored his own vague suggestion that what was in the frame, only what was painted, would be given life. Mona Lisa suddenly has a whole body and can walk, the silent highwayman (and Clyde does point out that he can't speak because his mouth was never painted) who can fire pistols repeatedly even though they're supposed to be single load. How on earth can he fire them anyway, did the artist paint the bullet primed in the chamber?
We've also seen much of this before - Luke's growing pains and his last minute bluff with the villain particularly - and now we're in the third year of SJA this familiarity is starting to breed contempt. By the time K9 pops up from a drawing and zaps the Abomination, Mona Lisa's Revenge has more or less drifted along on a sea of improbable and highly coincidental MacGuffins, scenery chewing and vague ideas. Now, can someone please write a real script because this one has definitely got 'this is a fake' watermarked all the way through it.

November 13, 2009

There aren’t that many aspects of Doctor Who that could be considered sacred ground. The geography of the series is such that any idea, item and even historical events have been run across over and over again, be they the sinking of the Marie Celeste, volcano day in Pompeii or visits from Shakespeare. Not even the mythology of the series is immune to being written and rewritten, crossed out and written over again until it resembles the order slip in our local takeaway when I’m trying to decide what to have for dinner and I’m not sure if I’m in the mood for sweet and sour or a curry. It tends to depend on the original story the object featured.

City of Death is just such a story. Written by a proper writer and the nation’s favourite until Steven Moffat wrote Blink, Douglas Adams’s Paris runaround is about as perfect a story as you’re like to find in old Who and the reason I visited the city (this was in the time before I discovered the French New Wave). To grasp my love for the story, I’d suggest you read this, and this but suffice to say that my eyebrows were nestled firmly in the arches of my receding hairline when I heard that The Sarah Jane Adventures were going to have the audacity of producing Mona Lisa’ Revenge.

Sacrilege. Sacrilege! I was in the curious position of being on the theological side of the Life of Brian debate from Friday Night, Saturday Morning and like Mervyn Stockwood, then Bishop of Southwark, I was rubbing a religious talisman, in my case the keyring in the shape of the Eiffel Tower I’d bought when I was in Paris (clip here, from a documentary curiously narrated by young David Tennant). But unlike them, I was willing to watch with an open mind. I quite like Suranne Jones usually and well it is the Sarah Jane Adventures, so what’s the worse that could happen?

At least the version of the Mona Lisa used wasn’t the charming GCSE-level slap job that appeared in City of Death. And the National Museum of Cardiff, a refreshingly different idea for a "base under siege", looked suitably grand doubling as the “International Art Gallery” even if the dressings in the room from Temple of Peace in which the painting was displayed could only partially hide it’s first appearance as part of Platform One in The End of the World. The performances of the regulars couldn’t really be faulted either, the scene between Lis Sladen and Alexander Armstrong in the opening episode more than making up for Sarah Jane dropping out for most of the rest of the story.

Otherwise Mona Lisa’s Revenge was a tedious bunch of old cobblers, easily as bad as Enemy of the Bane and nudging towards Secrets of the Stars. At the risk of sounding like a prosecuting lawyer in kids television equivalent of The Hague, it’s one of those examples of a drama whose awfulness slowly occurs to you over time until you reach a point when you realise you can’t quite believe what you’re watching and if you’re like me you start shouting. It happened forme at about the time Lisa began flashing her blaster around and with relatively few anti-lulls I sat slumped wanting it to end and knowing that it wasn’t going to for many, many, many minutes.

Like Secrets of the Stars, the awfulness of the story can be largely traced to the central performance within the guest cast. Suranne Jones, like Russ Abbot before her, seems to have been under the impression that the thing to do in children’s sci-fi is to go BIG and indulge in the very worst campery no matter what the rest of the cast seem to be doing. She was loud, she was brash and she sucked the air out of every scene. Jones can be a capable actress, except instead of the camp joy of Kate O’Mara, her keystone seemed to be Geoffrey Orme’s Zaroff in The Underwater Enemy, the rest of the guest cast caught in the crossfire.

Jones wasn’t helped by the ripeness of the dialogue and characterisation gifted to her which didn’t rise above a register much higher than “Nothing in the world can stop me now, ducks”. Writer Phil Ford does seem to have a problem writing his adversaries. With the exception of Day of the Clown’s Old Bob they really are a set of one-dimensional ravers, which as Gareth Roberts shows in The Trickster doesn’t necessarily need to be so. In Mona’s case, with the exception of her serpentine seduction of Jeff Rawle’s curator, much of her action consisted of empty threats and declarations of what she was about to do if she could just do something else.

There was one scene that suggested the possibilities for the character; when faced with the outside world she (for some unexplained reason) found she couldn’t step i’th’sun lest she become oil paint again. But the melancholic implications of that weren’t full explored because Ford was too intent on replicating some of the story points about being trapped in pictures from sources as diverse as Roald Dahl’s The Witches (Solveg, pictured), Justin Richards’s Demontage and Matthew Graham’s Fear Her, a corner he was presumably painted into when coming up with the mechanism for Mona being released from the painting in the first place.

After Mona Lisa’s Revenge, we’re now expected to believe that in an already convoluted Whoniverse, when Leonardo Di Vinci painted the original Mona Lisa, he used some paint from his weirdo neighbour, made-up artist Di Cattivo, which with its alien properties led to Mona becoming a corporeal manifestation with a Mancunian accent. Di Vinci was then kept a prisoner by the splinter of Scaroth that was Captain Tancredi (“Captain Tancredi?!?”) and forced to paint six copies of the painting all with “this is a copy” marked on the canvas by the Doctor. Where those six created using the same paint? Was there a small army of Mona’s waiting to be released?

The story’s whole attitude to art was fairly suspect. The veneration of the Mona Lisa was a good idea and the painting was presumably chosen by David Fisher for much the same reason when he was writing his first draft of City of Death. It’s recognisable, iconic. And there is some Reithian merit in explaining something of when Di Vinci created the work (even if, like City of Death, it forgets to mention that the painters ironically worked on the thing in France during the revolution). But made-up artist Di Cattivo’s work looked entirely out of period to me and I say that not because I’m trying to be a farty-farty-Sewell-pants but because it breaks the authenticity of the story.

The selection of Clyde’s painting too says a lot about the judges they’d choose it above whatever else was submitted by the other students. It’s part of the cranking out the plot, of course. You have to place the kids in the gallery and the only justifiable reason they’d visit would after winning a competition. Rani’s had her episode, Luke’s is coming up so it has to be Clyde. What kind of art would Clyde do? Well we’re not going the Pushing Daisies route and working against type (no knitting) so it has to be a sub-2000 AD daub instead of anything too challenging. Nothing too witty, please.

The requisite soap element seemed old hat too (as old hat, in fact as using the phrase 'old hat' to describe something as being old hat). The material about Luke becoming more human and leaving his room untidy was the kind of thing which motored the first season culminating in The Lost Son and it seems out of character for Luke to leave his room untidy anyway. Is he doing it on purpose, is that the idea? What kind of message is that to send kids? The loss of Sarah Jane for much of the story is also a disappointment, especially since the reason was a rerun of the aforementioned Fear Her, though probably understandable if it was a production requirement. Was Lis taking a well earned break or filming her scenes for The Marriage of Sarah Jane Smith?

It's also fairly ironic that Fisher and Adams wrote K9 out of City of Death for precisely the reason he was deployed here to vanquish the enemy. True, his appearance was part of Luke's plan and he wasn't the real K9 (somehow having knowledge of his masters and mistresses despite having originated from a drawing which means he might as well equally be wondering where Romana, Leela, her K9 and the rest of Gallifrey have got to). But as the writers in the original series soon realised, you have to use the robot dog sparingly otherwise your audience will be waiting around for him to save the day, each and every week. After set up the creepiness of this monster from the painting, the writer effectively capsized his good work by making him easily beaten with a laser beam.

Having worked on accession databases in art galleries, I could also take against the idea that this museum would have cellar full of work which hasn’t been looked at since Victorian times and which the curator doesn’t have much of an idea about I’m genuinely making myself angry thinking about it which is not what you want on a Friday night and was the least of the story's problems. There’s only so much you can say against a thing before you become tedious yourself and I suspect I’m outstaying my welcome and best get out before I start making unfair direct comparisons with Douglas Adams and going into the usual tat about the decline of television in general. Suffice to say I didn’t like this. At all. And it’s probably spoiled City of Deathfor me, which is its worst crime of all.

November 08, 2009

After last week's story expressed the emotional heart of the series, you can forgive Phil Ford for not quite matching its success with The Eternity Trap. It was a hard act to follow. He certainly understands here the importance of striking out with a different tone. And what better way to help him do that than a particularly savvy commando raid on the horror genre toy box. He, and director Alice Troughton, put all their efforts into providing a rich brew of horror and suspense tropes, evoking a sense of pure nostalgia in us silver haired viewers but likely to act as a refresher course in the genre's narrative and visual hooks for the youngsters out there. There's no better way to plant seeds in the minds of the curious and introduce them to the required texts.

Based on this I hope that teens everywhere are Googling The Stone Tape and getting their first introduction to the master of the genre, Nigel Kneale, or their parents are scaring the heck out of them with a first screening of The Shining or The Innocents or both. A scientific investigation into paranormal phenomena might well be something they've only seen recently on Most Haunted but hopefully the younger audience will get past that dubious association and unearth the genre's own rather prolific stone tape of influences.

The trail is there, from the echoing snatch of Al Bowly singing 'Midnight, The Stars And You' (thanks to The Shining) as Clyde and Rani explore the pavilion and get creeped out by a fountain that starts up of its own accord, the almost subliminal shots of the Marchwood children standing in the corridors (The Shining again), to the wet footprints and ghostly laughter that reminds you of that story of the uncanny par excellence The Innocents and its Henry James source, to Floella Benjamin's blatant nod to the 'stone tape theory' as she explains why the Pharos Institute are investigating Ashen Hill Manor. Yes, a haunted house story that even nicks a few bits from The Haunting too with invisible creatures stalking the characters and Benjamin's opening narration. As Rani sums it up, 'Some of us are a bit new to this kind of thing. You might need to explain.' Clyde however invokes plenty of modern examples of the genre including Harry Potter and Tim Burton to comfortably mark out the territory for the uninitiated.

Troughton works very hard to generate genuine tension and chills and she achieves this admirably. There's a very feverish atmosphere about Episode One as Sarah, Clyde and Rani explore the various rooms of the Manor accompanied by Troughton's continually prowling and tracking camera. She's not afraid to use it as a character's point of view either and to also keep the threats out of the frame, using suggestion as a way to build the atmosphere. A tried and tested methodology that can't be beaten. Throw in composer Sam Watts insistence on using that oh-so-familiar musical motif from Krzysztof Penderecki's 'The Awakening Of Jacob' as showcased so effectively by Kubrick in The Shining and the visual and aural delights are complete.

So the stage is set, paying off very handsomely in Episode One, but as is often the case with Sarah Jane Adventures, the concluding denouement comes over as rushed, slightly incoherent and offers a villain who barely has time to get his motivation across and do his nefarious deeds before Sarah Jane and company put the mockers on him. The story in itself is engaging up to a point and one of the more interesting side tracks that The Eternity Trap makes is its exploration of the effects of modernity and rationalisation upon unexplained phenomena, where Professor Rivers, Sarah Jane, Clyde, Rani and Toby all strive to secularise, intellectualise and systematise their reactions to the uncanny and paranormal phenomena.

Rivers wants to study it and apply scientific rationalisation to it, Sarah Jane and her companions simply want to categorise it as alien because that is the perfect way for them to expertly deal with the cause of the phenomena. The overlaying of a technological, scientific solution onto the manifestations at Ashen Hill Manor key into similar science=magic discussions that have cropped up in Doctor Who itself, everything from The Daemons through to The Image Of The Fendahl. Toby Silverman is a pivotal character here - he's a scientist who wants to prove the existence of paranormal phenomena because it's a personal matter in that he also has to prove it to a disenchanted father figure. By the end of Episode One, even Rani's convinced that all they have seen is real, whilst Sarah Jane remains thoroughly sceptical. However, as soon as Clyde and Rani open the cupboard in Erasmus' underground chamber and we see the flashing lights of machinery, the genie is out of the bottle and Phil Ford's carefully built hysteria fizzles away. It's then clear Episode Two will be spent putting two fingers up to the notion of haunted houses, ghosts and things that go bump in the night.

One of the problems with Episode Two is Donald Sumpter's ripe performance. I suspect it's his way of overcompensating for the lack of decent motivation and development for the Erasmus Darkening character. By playing it up he's helping cover up the underlying weakness of the threat. The best parts of Episode Two are the more emotionally affecting moments with Lord Marchwood and his search for his lost children Joseph and Elisabeth. By eventually reuniting them the story does partly achieve some decent closure. Again, the splitting up of families is a consistent theme and is echoed again by the crowd of people who have have been trapped in the house and cut off from their loved ones. It also dovetails rather nicely with Toby's story, providing us with some further explanation for his belief in the supernatural after Sarah Jane denounces it as 'nonsense'. His claims about something 'grey, with no face' haunting his six year old self fit well into his obvious parent - child anxieties. It's more about the cruelty of a parent not recognising the trauma of a frightened child than definite evidence of the existence of paranormal beings. Whatever it was has driven Toby on to try and prove his fear, and by extension his belief, to his father.

Knowing more or less that Erasmus is some extra-dimensional creature using technology to trap people rather undermines the efforts to keep the concluding episode scary. Clyde and Rani running round the Manor as all manner of things spring into life around them tends to lack the creepiness of similar scenes in Episode One even if the sequence of them being pursued by an invisible creature is still reasonably effective. It unfortunately becomes more like Ghostbusters rather than the visceral thrills of an M.R. James story. However, overall it's certainly better than Ford's rather limp season opener and without Luke, K9 and Mr. Smith the script gets to spend some time beefing up the relationship between Rani and Clyde. This is helped by engaging performances from Daniel Anthony and Anjli Mohindra. Adam Gillen makes Toby geeky and odd but also rather sympathetic. Floella Benjamin's a complete law unto herself as Celeste Rivers.

In the end Episode Two treads water to the inevitable conclusion where Sarah Jane will put a spanner in Erasmus' works and send him flying back to where he came from. Even though we see Rivers return to our dimension what's not entirely clear is whether the rest of the trapped souls return to their own places in time and space. The Marchwoods, it would seem, have actually become ghosts which does rather confuse the rationalisation of the paranormal that the story strives to hammer home. The final scene shows Toby, now set back on the path of scientific rationalism, leaving and Clyde announcing 'No such things as ghosts then, Sarah Jane?' as she gets an eyeful of the spooks watching her from the windows of the Manor. Having your cake and eating it seems to be Ford's desire at the end of that episode.

November 06, 2009

One of my current guilty pleasures is The Well, a short form haunted house adventure produced by BBC Switch, the slightly hazy department brought in when it was decided that the BBC Childrens shouldn’t cater for anyone over the age of twelve to offer something to older teenagers, in this case one of those 360 degree productions that also includes a computer game on the website.

You’ve probably heard of it before because it’s also the very horror drama Karen Gillan recorded before moving to Cardiff and though its slender plot-based running time (the episodes are about eight minutes long) doesn’t allow for much in the way of poetic dialogue or revelatory performances (The Kevin Bishop Show was a better expression of Karen’s charms), there are some truly disconcerting moments as the four central teenagers become enveloped in The Well’s mystery and it’s particularly sinister because it was filmed just round the park from where I’m sitting.

It provides an interesting contrast for Phil Ford’s "haunted" house adventure The Eternity Trap which is obviously focused on the younger age group. The Well also has its fair share of torch-lit dark corridor moments but is dealing in psychological horror as each of the characters finds themselves becoming part of “whatever’s down there” in some cases almost killing them in the process. In this Sarah Jane adventure, though the regulars are often captured and lots of threats are made against them, all of them are in a kind of implied danger and none of them really got hurt – only Enrico Casali from The Wheel in Space, sorry, Commander Ridgeway from The Sea Devils, sorry Erasmus Darkening was hurt in the end (though given we knew nothing much about him and he was only sucked into a portal I expect even that’s not true). The rule seems to be – kids tv – no hurt the regulars – hazy teenage tv – hurt them plenty.

Yet The Eternity Trap does mange to be properly unsettling in places and not just because of Adam Gillen’s (no relation) performance (which seemed to pitched somewhere between Richard Pearce giving us his Jeremy Fitzoliver in The Paradise of Death and Dustin Diamond giving us his Screech in Saved By The Bell). For once, the budget constraints of the series work for the story, cutting Sarah Jane, Clyde and Rani off from most of the fantastical elements which usually aid them in their adventures, Mr Smith, K9, the Attic and Luke (Tommy Knight probably off doing his GCSEs or filming a Luke heavy episode for later in the series) and conveniently their mobile phones and putting them into a single scary location (assuming this wasn’t recorded in about five different locations like these things usually are). Aided only by a sonic lipstick, tricorder wrist watch and some not-ghosts with a keen eye for well paced exposition, means that easy answers aren’t always forthcoming providing some genuine mystery.

Ford and director Alice Troughton work their way through the haunted house playbook from top to bottom, but in a fairly knowing way, in that way that Tom Baker refers to when he says "Doctor Who is watched at several levels in an average household. The smallest child terrified behind a sofa or under a cushion, and the next one up laughing at him, and the elder one saying 'sh, I want to listen', and the parents saying 'isn't this enjoyable'.” We know that the books moving about, doors closing, wind in a still room, random sourceless noises and presences appearing and disappearing and the monster we can only see in eye of terror of its prey through point of view shots or red eyes in the darkness are clichés hoary and old but we can giggle at the fact that this could be the first time some kids are exposed to them knowing that they’ll graduate to Poltergeist, The Blair Witch Project and Halloween later. They might be cliché’s but they work.

When Troughton stops us from being able to see what’s going on outside the televisual frame by not providing obvious cutaways and calls on composer Sam Watts to layer in some deathly inhuman sounds on the soundtrack it’s difficult not get a slight chill, especially if like me you’re watching it in a cold room (and can’t be arsed to get up and put the radiator on). And we can tell that Ford knows what he’s doing because in the opening episode, when, and not for the first time in the Whoniverse, he invokes Nigel Kneale; this isn’t a couple of kooks investigating the phenomena in the house but scientists from the Pharos Insitute on a research trip, a trope that Kneale consistently used, and it’s suggested that the ghostly activity might be a way of proving the Stone Tape theory, which the Quatermass writer of course turned into a tv play in the early 70s that also revolved around a haunted mansion (and not using the inverted commas that have to surround the pile at the centre of The Eternity Trap).

As a threat Erasmus Darkening was a little bit disappointing. The trapping of those poor people in a nether dimension was a bit non-specific (certainly less clear than in Big Finish's The Chimes at Midnight) and with the exception of that wonderful shot of the multitude on the stairs had all of the hallmarks of an Ainley Master special, lots of tell, not much show, plenty of giggling, lots of tricks. Rather like Torchwood’s Bilis Manger he promises much, has volumes of personality, is a bit creepy, probably frightening enough for a generation who missed out on The Demon Headmaster, but is also somehow aireless. It’s the timeslot perhaps which stops this leather-pated scoundrel from turning up to eleven; Sumpter constantly seemed forced to hold something back, as though he was expecting the next line to be filled with some black language that would open up the gates of hell and he didn’t want to go too far just in case. Perhaps another time (editor, please insert a funny joke here about European exchange students. Thanks).

But all in all, I’m quite enamoured with The Eternity Trap. It’s certainly Phil Ford’s best script since The Last Sontaran and like that season two opener, really benefited from being set in one location and with a tiny group of characters, far away from the multiple location large cast stories in which the needs of production have a habit of overwhelming the story. I’m not sure why Floella Benjamin plays Professor Rivers like she’s still narrating the documentaries on the Black Guardian dvd boxset all strange intonation and wild line readings but on the upside story also features Callum Blue, the Fitz Kreiner I have in my head and the best Doctor we’ll never have because he’s too much like David Tennant. Despite a floppy wig Callum gives a knock out performance as Lord Marshwood, yet another apparition after a year and a half on (the not quite as good after Bryan Fuller left) Dead Like Me. There’s a nice screwball relationship brewing between Clyde and Rani with the former’s habit of joking about everything he sees like a demented comedian's Twitter account and roving hands clearly getting on the latter’s wick and it’s nice to see Sarah Jane not treating a threat like it’s the scariest thing she’s ever seen, remembering that, to paraphrase a different franchise, she’s flown from one end of the galaxy to the other, and seen a lot of strange stuff.

Next Week: The series risks stepping over sacred ground. Will Mona have a tattoo on her back that reads "This is a fake"?